I then followed this up with another thought: “Which if nothing else means the press is long overdue in thinking about how it presents pre-release material and helps cultivate hype.”
A lot of people read this as me saying we shouldn’t hold devs responsible for what they say before a game’s release, that they can say whatever they want with no responsibility. Really, though, I meant the opposite: nothing a developer or a marketer says about their game before it is released should be taken as indicative of what the game will ‘actually’ be like. Nothing at all. All pre-release material (trailer, interviews, previews, playthroughs, etc.) should be treated with the utmost, complete cynicism and skepticism.
There’s a few different aspects of this (so smashing it all down to two tweets was a really good idea).
Firstly: games change during development. Games aren’t finished while they are still being developed. When a developer speaks about the game they are still making, the game they are clearly very excited about as Sean Murray was clearly excited about No Man’s Sky, everything they say is going to be aspirational. it’s only ever going to be what they hope/expect the final version of the game they are currently making to be. I don’t believe any developer really knows exactly what the final version of their game is going to look like until they’ve finished making it, just as I don’t know what a piece of writing is going to look like until I finish it. Things change. I have a general sense of what sort of experience I am aiming for, but the particulars is always up for grabs. As it is in any creative endeavour that is trying to bring a non-existent thing into existence. My students exhibited their games to the public last night. These games are very different from the ones they thought they were making even a week ago. When a developer says ’This game will be X’ it should always be read as ‘At present, we expect this game to be like X’.
Secondly: marketers inflate the truth and tell untruths and stay conveniently quiet about less sexy truths. We know this. When videogames aren’t involved, we’re pretty good at being critical about this. When Apple says I can buy a new Macbook ‘from $500’ I know that the $500 model is going to be the most bare-bones, smallest, shittiest model and most of the models will be $2000. Because that is how marketing works. There are pro-consumer regulations in place to prevent marketers telling outright lies, sure. That is good. That doesn’t mean consumers don’t still need to be critical and cynical in how they interpret the information marketers say to them.
Xavier Turner
Gumby baby
Luis Clark
Core game demographics are not very good at being critical of game marketing. Preview material is typically read as factual information about what a game will be and not content that exists exclusively for marketing purposes to make people spend money on a thing.
But that’s not simply because videogame consumers are gullible idiots. It’s because the pre-release marketing hype of publishers is super integrated into the day-to-day reporting of game journalism and how videogames are talked about generally. We always want to talk about the next big thing. The next final videogame that will, finally, be the one. Marketers sell us that myth because they know we have always lapped it up. Being excited by the next thing is the treadmill that all of gamer culture has been running on since the mid-80s.
Pre-orders are the ultimate conclusion of this culture where we are so excited for what videogames will one day become that we would rather pay for future games—imagined games—than for games that actually exist. Preview material (straight up curated marketing material) becomes a replacement for the critical evaluation that is meant to take place in a considered review after the game’s release so that we can all buy these future, imagined games.
Gamers being excited about games that aren’t out yet benefits three parties:
Grayson Gomez
1. The sellers of the videogame who can sell a creative work before any evaluative review or disgruntled mate can recommend otherwise. 2. The distributor of the videogame, for the same reason. 3. The enthusiast press outlets who, in reporting on imagined games, motivate the enthusiasm in their readership to keep being excited gamers about the future and, thus, to keep wanting to read content about games that are not out yet.
Videogame players do not benefit from being excited by imagined future games. They are made excited to be commodified.
But I wouldn’t even say it is the press’s ‘fault’ or that the press, now, could even change this. What I would say is that there is a complex, structural economy of parties that, for decades now, benefit from gamers being excited about videogames that are not released yet, and that player-buyers themselves are not one of those parties. The entire game industry and game journalism industry is built on this structure.
I do not buy the argument that Hello Games (or even Sony, really) deliberately lied or misled anyone. I do believe that they knew this videogame would motivate very powerful imaginations and excitement in a particular audience and were more than happy for that excitement to accelerate and inflate expectations so as to increase sales. I don’t think that is lying. I think that is marketing.
Oliver Kelly
Pointing out that neither the enthusiasm of developers nor the commercial concerns of marketers should ever be considered a ‘promise’ is not to say they have no responsibility or get off scott free. On the contrary it is the opposite. To never take pre-release statements about a game at its word. To always be cynical and disbelieving of any and all pre-release material, be it a straight-up commercial or a preview published by a good writer on an established game journalism website. Pre-release material is marketing material or, at best, second-order marketing material.
The best way to ensure player-buyers are not ‘duped’ into spending their money on games that are not what they believe them to be is to tear down the whole culture of ‘hype’ and ‘pre-orders’ and ‘day one reviews’ and expos full of unreleased games. It is to not wait until weeks after a game’s release before it is pointed out that the dev’s words on what the game will be probably shouldn’t be taken at face value.
We can talk about how marketers ‘should’ act in a pro-consumer sort of way, sure. But that seems idealist and not too helpful to me as marketers are always trying to find ways to frame the truth in a particular, beneficial light. More useful, I think, is to teach consumers to be more critical of what they listen to about un-released games. That would require more insight into how games are actually developed, and also more insight into how preview material comes into existence as a drip-feed of regulated information. But no one really benefits from consumers being more critical in this. Gamer culture is a cultivated, enthusiast, techno-determinist culture. It is about keeping an audience persistently excited by what comes next and persistently disappointed by what is available now.
Charles Myers
Anything said about a game before its release is said so in order to make people excited enough to buy before anyone has a chance to tell them why they shouldn’t. But I don’t think promises/lies is a useful way to think of this because that is a dichotomy that always has the possibility of being tricked into believing something false. Instead, pre-release information needs to be critically engaged with as always skewed, always coming from a particular perspective, and always having a particular goal to enthuse.
(A finally note: there is a difference between being disappointed that a game is different at release than what you had hoped it to be based on pre-release material, and feeling ‘lied to’ or ‘betrayed’ because the game is not what was ‘promised’. Here I am talking about the latter. Being simply disappointed a game is not something it is not is fine.)
(A finallier note: I also think No Man’s Sky is preeeeetty much exactly what Hello Games said it would be (with the exception of never explicitly shutting down the multiplayer hype) so I would contest that Hello Games ‘broke promises’ even if I didn’t contest that framing pre-release comments as ‘promises’ at all wasn’t already inaccurate. Instead, I feel people are very excited to be knowingly disappointed in a game that lots of people were excited about and which, beyond a very particular core culture, a lot of people seem to be thoroughly enjoying. But that’s something I’ll address when I finally write my own review/essay of the game.)
Joseph Rogers
We should just sue Sean Murray, I agree.
Isaac Smith
(Okay, one more note. How interesting that we consider it ‘fraud’ that Sean Murray never really shut down the idea of the game being multiplayer in pre-release interviews and stuff, despite the fact that on the screen on PSN where you buy the game, the screen with the information about the game you are about to buy, it says ‘single player’. There is a broader discussion here about what information around a game we consider descriptive, or what information we consider marketing.)
Here is Lewie Procter, perhaps the best pro-consumer games writer with a different opinion. Again, this is where I’d say that being disappointed and crying betrayal are different by a few degrees.
Here is what I think is the best essay on what No Man’s Sky actually is that has been written so far. Completely avoids the smug“well, actually, did you know procedural generation doesn’t mean endless content?” insufferableness of some other reviews.
I agree with you for the most part, OP. The biggest issue is Sean outright lying about multiplayer, and the dumb part on the hyped audience was not recognizing 'procedurally generated' as a giant red flag
Austin Ross
>anti -fan
Is this the new made-up thing that somehow discredits people?
